Licensing headaches are delaying the release of Apple's new Web media streaming software technology QuickTime Broadcaster
Apple is unhappy with the licensing terms proposed by MPEG-LA (the largest group of MPEG-4 patent holders). They require both companies who ship MPEG-4 codecs and content providers who use the codec to stream video, to pay royalties to the MPEG-LA.
Apple is happy to pay the fee for using the codecs in QuickTime, but does not believe MPEG-4 can be successful in the marketplace if content owners are forced to pay royalties to use it as well.
QuickTime Broadcaster is the Mac OS X Server's key multimedia serving technology, competing with Windows Media Technologies.
The licensing problems have also delayed the release QuickTime 6, the player that QuickTime Broadcaster is designed to run with.
If released the software will be available as a free download, and will allow users to capture and encode QuickTime content, including MPEG-4.
Features of the QuickTime Broadcaster include live encoding with real time preview and the ability to record and hint in real time to a computer's hard disk for quick video-on-demand processing.
